Because energy consumers cannot afford to install monitoring equipment and devices at every point of utilization within their facility, nearly every monitoring system has unmetered or unmonitored loads. In many cases these unmetered loads can account for a substantial portion of the customer's usage of a utility. Although the primary charter of monitoring equipment manufacturers is to provide utility consumers with useful and accurate information on the quality and consumption of a utility within their facility, a proper evaluation of these unmetered loads through the use of virtual meters is often overlooked in the manufacturers' product offerings.
Many monitoring systems include a large number of physical intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). Each IED measures data either continuously or as requested by the software managing the monitoring system. Spatial context of the physical IEDs manifested as a hierarchy is generally not a consideration for determining the order of interactions between the physical monitoring devices and the managing software. In fact, the order of interactions is commonly arbitrarily set by the software managing the power monitoring system.
What is needed, therefore, are methods and systems for improving the accuracy of virtual meters in utility monitoring systems, which can account for a large percentage of customer loads.